A restaurant has apologised after a man nearly swallowed a slug which was floating in his pint and he still was not given his meal for free.

A children’s birthday party got off to a sluggish start on Sunday night when father Grant Knight, from Hurst, took his first sip of a pint and felt a slimy lump in his mouth.

His wife Linda Knight, described the moment.

She said: “I think it’s atrocious. We were all chatting and he went to drink his drink, then coughed and spat something back into the glass.

“He thought there was a big slice of onion, because it was floating upside down and it was white underneath.

“He said ‘what is that?’and we looked and it was a huge slug in the pint.”

Mrs Knight, of Willow Way, said when she took the drink, with the floating slug, to the counter and asked to speak to the manager, the manager came out but tried to slither out of the complaint by blaming the incident on the slug.

“He said: ‘Well it probably came in from outside’.

“I said: ‘Well this really is not good enough that could have been a child. If that was a coke we might not have seen it’, and I asked: ‘what is your procedure here?’ and he didn’t have an answer.”

The adults did not want to end the 12-year-old girl’s birthday party because of the slug so they still ordered their dinner despite the fact they had all lost their appetites and Mr Knight felt sick.